Answer to you Pikey!

A misanthropic Christmas in the Arctic Circle
by Charles Foster (places – october 05)

I was told to get out from under my family’s feet at Christmas and let them get on with enjoying themselves. So, having been thrust from the glowing hearth and the groaning table, I went to Finland.

It wasn’t a place which meant much to me. But that shouldn’t matter. Normally when you arrive in a new country, ignorant of its history, literature and vital statistics, you can work out very quickly the main themes of its nationalism. For a characteristic to be sufficiently strong or important to be regarded by a people as definitive of their nation, it has to be obvious enough to form part of the genius loci detectable by the ignorant outsider. Or so a pretentious piece in the in-flight magazine had said. For want of anything more fulfilling to do when everyone else was having rosy-cheeked festive times, I put this theory to the test in Finland.

Finland, I found, has taken its architecture from St Petersburg and Innsbruck, its food from Sweden and Alsace, its women from Mount Olympus and its conversation from the grave. The Finns are terrifyingly upright. Finnish pedestrians will wait for hours in the cold at a crossing on an empty wilderness road until the light tells them they can walk. They only get homicidal in the dark winter months, and then their pineal glands and not their personalities are to blame. They are kind, helpful and useful, like steri-strips. They make some of the world’s finest mobile phones. They are all constitutional vegetarians who happen to eat meat. They have a pathological dearth of neuroses.

To travel in winter from the Baltic to Finnish Lapland is to travel through a landscape of monotonous beauty; of unremitting loveliness. There is a strange, unearthly silence, broken only by the screams of German snowmobile riders careering fatally into fir trees and Baltimore housewives being savaged by sledge dogs. The sun, if it is there at all, is at a steep angle, and lends unreal depth to everything it touches. There is a perpetual dawn, and the shadows are crystalline.

But it is a curiously passionless place. Falstaff could never have been Finnish. Finland is beauty without a taste. If it were a corner of Narnia it would be a corner populated by non-talking animals. If it were a corner of Surrey, it would be populated by orthodontists. It is to life-affirming fervour what Dettol is to real ale. I don’t blame this on the Finns. If, like the Russians, they nailed poems on their trees and cried huskily into their schnapps when they saw a bad postcard of the homeland, it might have helped, but the land would still have no audible voice of its own. It really isn’t, even if you are a Finn, something to make you jump into a trench and have a nasty time fighting about.

Certainly nobody would risk a graze for an arctic wilderness which you enter via the absurd and obscene Santa Claus theme park on the Arctic Circle. But it is a pretty fragile wilderness which is drained of all its awe by a bear pate retail outlet, Santa’s Post Office (staffed, dream-shatteringly, by mournful Swedes with black tights and blue lips) and some cold Laps, paid $2 an hour to sit authentically in a skin tent reading Playboy magazine and making fox traps. If you tapped Finnish nationalism, the only resonance would be the resonance of complete hollowness.

What are the Finns nationalist about? There are two themes in the nationalist literature: pastoralism – lots of bad verses about streams and forests and jumping fish – and lots of frenzied averment about what the Finns are not. That’s weird, if you think about it. You’d think a travel agent was strange if, in answer to the question “What do you do for a living?” he said “I’m not an actuary”. And you’d certainly think he was odd if he went to war to convince people that he wasn’t an actuary when no one had ever said that he was. Arwidson, a high priest of the 19th century cult of National Romanticism, wrote: “Swedes we are not; Russians we will not become, so let us be Finns.” The nationalist leaders were wise not to ask in their writings just what Finns were. But no effort has been made since independence to answer the embarrassing question. That’s surprising. It is surprising too that no one has tried to relate Finnish landscape to national character: no one ever says that the Finns are not whatever they are not because the landscape is the way it is. Most countries with long dark winters, an enormous paper industry and a literate population have filled libraries with more or less coherent national navel-gazing on exactly that subject.

Finland has been the classical creature of regional realpolitik: its policy has been one of (possibly prudent but often cynical) pragmatism, flirting, since its independence in 1917, successively with Soviet Russia, Imperial Germany, the USA, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union again, and latterly with the European Union. That sort of promiscuity is bound to leave you with some nasty metaphorical pustules on your national genitalia. And normally you wouldn’t want to discuss those sorts of proclivities loudly in the bar. But in Finland they’re apparently proud of it: this pragmatism even has a name – the Paasikivi-Kekkenen Line – after two of its main proponents. They were both presidents of Finland and, depressingly, their statues aren’t covered with phlegm. However geopolitically sensible the policy might have been, the price of national political passivity has been high. The passivity is in part a cause and in part an effect of the pristine sexlessness of the landscape and the shallow melancholy of the Helsinki drunks.

In short, then, it was all gruesome. Such are the inconsistencies of men, though, that I shall be back there this Christmas, and I can’t wait.

So pikey you asked me to tell you what I think of this text. Oh boy where should I start :lol: Did you write this? :wink:

Well… there are lots of things that are true or atleast partly true. And some things I don’t totally agree with but I can surely understand why some one foreign would think or feel that way.

Finland, I found, has taken its conversation from the grave.

We Finns don’t find silence awkward in any possible way. Some times it’s even polite not to say anything. Sure we need to practise our small talk a lot :lol: Mostly people just don’t like talking with a stranger or opening up at all. Talking just takes too much energy…

They make some of the world’s finest mobile phones.

well thank you (Nokia is the best by the way)

But it is a curiously passionless place. Falstaff could never have been Finnish. Finland is beauty without a taste.

Finnish people find it impolite to show their own passions. That’s probably why the surrounding feels also passionless. But even if people don’t always show their passion it doesn’t mean that it’s not there :wink:

What are the Finns nationalist about? Arwidson, a high priest of the 19th century cult of National Romanticism, wrote: “Swedes we are not; Russians we will not become, so let us be Finns.”

And kippis to that! :lol: To find out WHAT the Finnish really are you have to understand our history in World war 2. Many things come from back there.

this pragmatism even has a name – the Paasikivi-Kekkenen Line – after two of its main proponents

It’s Kekkonen, Urho Kaleva Kekkonen… :x (he’s some sort of a legend of its own) this subject leads from ww2 also :roll:

The person who wrote this really should visit Finland in Midsummer. Every thing is upside down then: there’s more sun that your mind can handle… ok the drunks are the same but everything else might surprise you 8)

Is that enough or is there more you would like to talk about dear pikey?